Monday, June 14

Instructions for making a rainstickWhen your hidden joyplumps and swellspurple,unbearable,let the wind tickle her tiny feetand the unicorn cloudbreeze her away.

With your baby teethhollow out your gourdfrom the heart out,until you are as emptyas the moonwhen she smiles onthe sea and joustswith the bobbing mastsof wandering ships.

Sweep the floor of your echoless tabernaclewith royal feathers plucked from peacocks.Dry the bleeding walls of your vessel with a shroudmade of fleece shorn from blind goats.

You are ready now.

Fill your earth top with pebbles and beads,grains of rice, beans and pumpkin seeds,leave your sky bottom whistlingclear and clean and cold,so when the shudder laughrolls through you,tumbles and upends youin the murmuring wave,the rains will come at last,at long lastthe rain will come.

This poem is taking a ride on the Poetry Bus, which this week has been driven by Jeanne Iris. Click on her name to see what other poetry bus riders have done. Jeanne has asked participants to include an audio of us reading our poems; mine is below. This is the first time I do this, so there have been some technical glitches and the audio quality is not good. I'll either think about getting a better microphone or putting an early end to my recording career...

31 comments:

This is one of those poems where anything I see in it and say about it now could change in subsequent readings. I've read it four times.

There is powerful sweetness here, of the rites of the writer and muse, the organics of working out what is within, the primordial ritual of spilling out life and then recycling what has been given by other spent lives, to make sound.

To find this way you did of expressing the making of sound from out of the inner sanctum - the work of a poet - is profound and skillful.

i loved, loved, loved this. the flow, imagery, it was a beautiful story. i couldn't hear your poem however, i just viewed the image, which i found disappointing. i would have loved to hear you read it. the rain sound by clapping was fun. i'm glad i stopped in today.

Enjoyed hearing you speak your poem -- Hearing it said aloud by the poet breathes life into the words -- This poem about making a rain-stick is definitely not traditional nor a childlike craft, it is an evocative, whimsical, and mystical piece of poetry.

I loved this - it had the aura of a spell to me, and in fact (as we do NOT need any more rain) I was thinking I shouldn't have played the audio - perhaps it won't conjure the rain HERE since you're reading it THERE.

When you write like this I swear I hold my breath :). I can't take it in line by line. I must look at it word to word. Then line by line. Then overall. Then back to word by word. Absolutely lovely! The imagery is stunning. How do you do it? I wish this was on 10th Daughter. Don't know if there is a theme posted; don't know anything about the latest there, but know this would be hard for another writer to beat in terms of the pure beauty of words.

I LOVE this poem! I'm equally as happy to hear you read it. I turned my control panel way up, so the sound wasn't a problem for me. You have an awesome reading voice and fantastic timing.

If I had to pick favorite lines, I'd end up rewriting the entire poem. I am particularly fond of:

"With your baby teethhollow out your gourdfrom the heart out,until you are as emptyas the moon"

But then again, I am in love with the ending. Like the rain that comes, your words flow beautifully. I'm having the same reaction as other people have, because I've got to read it (and listen) yet again. Wonderful work!

Lorenzo! I've had my head out of the blog reading mode this week, and just catching up now.

This poem! Evocative, tender, multi-layered. Hard to find the words to express all that is in it. If I were to read it in a college poetry class, we'd dissect it for hours.

Enjoyed your reading of it. More of us blog-poets need to consider such an avenue of letting our voices be heard. There is nothing like hearing the author of a poem share their words as they were meant to flow.

Never seen the rain sound by clapping video either, until now. A treat.

Oh, Lorenzo! I'm just now getting out into visiting my blogging friends, and I find this miraculous poem. I couldn't enjoy your reading, for the audio link is inexcusably black, but I read the work over and over, loving the sound of the words, the images (oh! blind goats!), the emotions it created. Lovely. Just wonderful. You've outdone yourself.

I came back again to listen to your recording, after recording my own yesterday. It's not easy to do, to sound the way you want to. I think I erased four recordings I'd begun. I hope you will record more of your poems. There is something tender, and good, about hearing you, and hearing myself, hearing Dylan Thomas, or Robert Frost, speak the words we've written. Thank you for the idea. When you got to the following lines, I loved the rhyme, which seemed like just the right rain stick noise: